


Chasing Lightning

by Sholio



Category: Agent Carter (TV)
Genre: Case Fic, Electrocution, F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Thunder and Lightning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-01
Updated: 2016-08-01
Packaged: 2018-07-28 14:52:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7645378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peggy & the SSR pursue a supervillain in a lightning storm. Yes, I got them wet again. For my h/c bingo "electrocution" square.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chasing Lightning

Peggy had not had very many occasions during the time she worked for the New York SSR to leave the immediate vicinity of the metropolitan area along the coast. She did remember that it used to surprise her how quickly the urban sprawl fell away into small towns scattered along winding highways, with a patchy mix of forest and farms between them.

Tonight, in the dark and the rain, she could see very little beyond the limits of her headlights except an endless expanse of darkness, broken here and there by a scattering of lights marking rural farms or towns barely big enough to warrant the name. She had long since lost track of their twists and turns, and could only guess how far they'd come from the city. Beside her, in the passenger seat, Daniel had a map spread on his knees, which he was juggling together with a torch and one of the lab's handful of jury-rigged portable radiation detectors.

"Anything?" she asked, nodding to the handheld detector. It made her think of the Vita-Ray machine she'd once used; perhaps the lab had built it on the same base.

"Well, the needle moves, but I think it's just the ruts in the road jiggling it around," Daniel reported dubiously. "I'm guessing if there was something showing up for real, it'd do more than these little blips. That's the impression I got in the lab, anyhow."

Peggy narrowly avoided a vast puddle, looming in the SSR car's headlights, that looked like it might have swallowed the entire car. Her tires slid in mud, but she managed to regain traction before they slid into the grassy verge. The road was an absolute mess, and the windshield wipers barely made a dent against the pouring rain. Somewhere thunder rumbled, and a flash of lightning lit up the rain-soaked field alongside them. 

"And to think," Daniel murmured, straightening the disarrayed map on his knees as they hit a relatively level section of the rutted farm road. "We could have been languishing in California right now."

"No rain," Peggy said wistfully. "Dry roads."

"Dry _socks."_

"Such a burden." 

Thunder crashed again, almost directly overhead. Peggy jerked involuntarily, wrenching the steering wheel to the side and nearly sending the car into a skid on the wet dirt of the road. Rain she didn't mind, rain she was used to, but she was still not entirely accustomed to these wild storms the North American continent was prey to.

"Where the heck are we?" Daniel murmured, inspecting the map by the torch beam.

"As you're the one with the map, I find that statement somewhat less than reassuring."

The radio burst into an indecipherable crackle of static. Peggy glanced at Daniel, who shrugged, having understood it no better than she had. In this hilly, rural country, the radio had been of limited use. By now Jack's SSR dragnet must have spread out over half of eastern New York. It would be just their luck that they _would_ find their quarry and wouldn't be close enough to any of the other agents to report in by radio.

They were searching for an SSR lab tech who had accidentally bathed himself in unknown radiation when a device the lab was working on had exploded. At first he'd seemed amazingly unharmed, with only minor side effects -- but that was before he went home, kissed his wife, and she fell dead at his feet.

And _that_ apparently had caused him to … well … break. Peggy had seen this in people during the war, when they hit a snapping point with the blood and death around them, and took leave of their senses. In Dr. Gless's case, he'd fled, killing a neighbor in the process simply by brushing against him, and a taxi driver on his way out of the city. At this point there was absolutely no telling where he was, or whether he was dangerous from casual exposure or at a distance. Every available agent had been thrown into the search.

…. including two West Coast agents who happened to have unwisely come back East for a law enforcement conference when all of this went down. (Conference slash social visit; Jack wasn't the only one who occasionally showed up unannounced on a flimsy pretext just to say hi.)

"First we got a guy who can kill you if he talks to you, and now we got one who kills you if he touches you," Jack's voice came suddenly over the radio, as if summoned by Peggy's stray thought. He, at least, was loud and clear -- so he must be close to them, or at the very least on a neighboring hilltop. "I think we need to find a new line of work, boys."

Peggy reached for the radio with the hand not on the steering wheel. "Boys, is it?"

"Excuse _me_ ," Jack's voice issued dryly from the radio's speaker. "Boys _and Peggy."_

"That's better."

She caught Daniel grinning at her. "Give him another few lessons," Daniel said, "and you might have him halfway civilized."

"I have no idea what you're talking about. Oh, _bollocks!"_ She saw the water-filled pothole in the road a second too late to avoid it completely, and the car's front tire slammed into it with a jarring impact. The car continued on its forward course, so she hoped there was no serious damage; it was hard to tell if there were any new rattles or sideways pulls in the steering, given the dismal state of the roads.

To Daniel's credit, he hadn't been backseat driving, at least not more than a tolerable level which she could reasonably ignore, and he didn't even mention the pothole. Instead he looked up from the map, through the rain sluicing down the windshield, and asked, "Are those headlights?"

They were indeed headlights, Peggy realized after another moment or two, glimmering wetly through the rain on their road. One of the other SSR cars? A farmer out exceedingly late? Or had Dr. Gless managed to get his hands on a vehicle? Granted, the odds of running into him by pure chance were slim … slim to nonexistent, she was beginning to think, given the size of the area they were searching.

Daniel reached for the radio. "We got headlights up ahead. Any of you boys on our road?"

"It would help a lot, Sousa, if you'd specify which road you were on," Jack answered irritably. "I see lights up ahead too. Could be you."

And it was. The two SSR cars pulled up abreast of each other, and Peggy cranked down the window. Jack gave them a friendly little wave through _his_ window.

"Fancy meeting you two out here. I don't suppose you saw any sign of Poughkeepsie back the way you came?"

"Are you kidding?" Daniel said, leaning around Peggy. "We're nowhere near Poughkeepsie. We're nowhere near the Hudson in general."

"Are you sure?" Jack asked, picking up his map. "I thought I was headed right for it."

"It's somewhat comforting to know there are people even more lost than we are," Peggy said.

"I'm not _lost,"_ Jack said testily.

"No, just misplaced. You know, Chief," Daniel said, "this is supposed to be _your_ patch, which means _you_ are supposed to know the area."

"I know the _city_ like the back of my hand," Jack shot back. "This sort of rural hell I usually leave to the bumpkins."

As if to underscore his words, or possibly in rebuttal, thunder crashed once more overhead. Peggy got some satisfaction from seeing Jack jump, too.

"Just think," Jack said, as the rumble of the thunder died away, "you two could've stayed in California and missed all of this."

"By a coincidence, we were discussing that very topic in the car," Peggy said. The wind blowing in the open car window swept a wave of rain in her face, making her squint against the onslaught. "Oddly, the words 'what a shame to have missed this' did not come up."

"Hey, you two," Daniel said. He'd withdrawn to his side of the car to look at the map again, but now he was focused on the radiation detector. "I thought this thing was bouncing all over the place because of the roads, but I'm still getting some jumps. Jack, what's yours doing?"

Jack reached for the detector on the seat next to him. "Huh. I'm getting a wiggle or two myself. Lab rats said we might get some false positives off power lines and whatnot."

"You see any power lines around here, Jack?" Daniel asked, looking out at the wet fields.

They weren't in the absolute middle of nowhere; the lashing trees brought Peggy glimpses of the lights of farmhouses. Still, there couldn't possibly be very many power sources to confuse the detectors. "Didn't the scientists say that traces of radiation would linger for hours where Dr. Gless had been?"

"Yeah, and the next part of that was, 'We don't think it's harmful, _but_ …'" Jack shook his head and picked up the mike of the car-mounted radio. "This is Chief Thompson. Anyone in range?"

No answer but static. Lightning flashed again, and Peggy glanced down at Daniel's detector in time to see the needle jump and then settle back.

"We're in the middle of a lightning storm," she pointed out. "The detectors could be responding to that alone."

"Possible," Daniel allowed. "I don't remember it doing it on the better roads, though. That's why I thought it was the jolting around that was causing it. And it was pouring cats back there, too."

Jack was still on the radio. "Come on, Jenkins, Martinez, I was just picking you boys up five minutes ago. Where the hell are you?"

"Probably halfway to Poughkeepsie," Daniel remarked. He reached for his door. "Anyone fancy a walk in the rain?"

No one fancied it in the slightest, but Jack pulled his car behind Peggy and Daniel's to avoid blocking the road entirely, while Daniel reached into the backseat for the overcoat he'd borrowed off one of the other agents. Peggy reached for her umbrella, simultaneously judging the odds that she could step out into the wind without the metal ribs instantly turning inside out.

"You can take my coat," Daniel said, shoving it at her.

"I'm quite all right, Daniel; I have my own coat and an umbrella."

Daniel glanced at her stylish jacket, which had seemed much more practical to Peggy a few hours ago, surrounded by the office towers of downtown Manhattan. "You sure?"

"Quite sure. If I start to turn blue we can take turns with the coat."

"Not to interrupt your little tete-a-tete in there," Jack said through the open window. "Or whatever it is that you're doing -- I wasn't going to pry, but some of us are working --"

Peggy opened the car door with intentional suddenness into his legs, forcing him to step backwards quickly into the deeper mud. "I'll have you know we are entirely professional at work."

"Yes, I've seen both of you emerge from the third-floor file room in professional disarray." Jack sidestepped skillfully out of striking range and examined his detector, holding a fold of his coat over it in a mostly-futile attempt to shield it from the rain. "I'm still getting what I guess are faint readings, not that I'm an expert. Sousa, how's yours looking?"

"Same." Daniel passed the detector to Peggy. Her umbrella had, as feared, inverted itself instantly, so she gave up on it, abandoning it in the car after cranking up the window. This gave her two free hands to Daniel's one, so she kept hold of the detector.

Lightning speared the sky along with a rolling crash of thunder, making all three of them jump.

"For the record," Jack said, as they began to walk back up the verge of the road with their detectors in hand, "I strictly forbid either of you to be struck by lightning. I can't even begin to imagine what the paperwork would look like on that -- visiting bureau chief from another agency and West Coast liaison, struck by lightning while pursuing a guy with poison hands in the middle of a wheat field … I don't think we have a form for that, so make an effort not to force me to invent one."

"I can't help noticing you're looking at me," Daniel said.

"Only one of us is carrying a metal crutch in a lightning storm, Sousa. I forbid you to get the rest of us electrocuted too, by the way."

"You know you're not my boss anymore, right?"

"I have a reading," Peggy interrupted.

Jack's attention dropped to his own detector, while Daniel leaned over Peggy's, making a commendable effort not to drip on it. She turned, sweeping the detector slowly before her. There was definitely a region at the edge of the rain-lashed field that was making it jump.

"He crossed the road," Daniel said.

"Looks like it," Jack agreed.

All three looked without enthusiasm at the sodden grass and brush alongside the road. In one direction lay a field; in the other, the land sloped up slightly and appeared to go over to tangled woods.

"Split up," Jack announced. "You two go one way, I'll take the other. But first I'm going to call this in, on the off chance anyone can hear us."

He started toward the cars, then turned, waving his handheld radio at them. "Do _not_ go out of radio range, got it? If we stop picking each other up, we both come back to the road."

"My thought exactly," Peggy agreed. "The last thing we need is the lot of us running about in the woods with no communications and a killer on the loose."

"Right." Jack turned away, then swung back again. "Remember, if he touches you, you're dead. So don't get touched."

"Thanks, Jack," Daniel said, and as Jack jogged off for the cars, added in an undertone, "Because we've completely forgotten in the last five minutes."

It chafed Daniel to be back in Jack's jurisdiction, Peggy knew. It was all too easy for both of them, Jack especially, to slip back into their earlier dynamic, when Jack had been giving orders and Daniel had no choice but to take them. Daniel thrived on the autonomy of running his own office in L.A., and being back on Jack's turf seemed to bring out a lot of the old rivalry and insecurity in both of them.

But it also wasn't something she wanted to get in the middle of; they'd have to work it out on their own. Instead, she turned to examine the wet roadside vegetation. "The field looks to be easier going."

"And we _do_ get to pick," Daniel pointed out. "At least if we make it over the wall before Commandant Thompson gets back."

Peggy laughed, despite the miserable weather and the discomfort of the rain creeping down her back. "The field it is, then."

They climbed over the fence -- Daniel turned out to be almost as adept at this as she was -- and squished into the soft soil and swishing grass of the field. "Jack, we're going this way!" Peggy called, waving, and got an answering wave in return.

The field had looked like easier walking, but it still wasn't simple, not with Daniel's crutch sinking into the softer soil and Peggy's shoes filling up with mud. Adding to the difficulty, they also had to sweep back and forth to pick up the faint radioactive traces in the field, an elusive trail that seemed to wander in an unsteady diagonal line from one corner of the field to the other. Not unexpected, Peggy supposed, for a man in Gless's unstable state of mind.

"So how dangerous do you suppose this radiation stuff is?" Daniel asked as they left the field behind and entered the dripping edge of the woods.

"I don't know. Vita-Rays aren't dangerous at all, at least not at a light exposure. But these are not the same, and if Dr. Gless's touch can kill, then I expect being in his close proximity might be an unhealthy choice."

The lab had found little trauma to the victims, at least from the reports Peggy had seen. Their hearts simply stopped. The SSR experts were still arguing over the exact cause of death. It hadn't looked like a particularly traumatic death, but Peggy had no intention of experiencing any sort of death at all.

"I think this is poison ivy," Daniel said, poking with the tip of his crutch at a sprawling plant with its wet leaves glistening brilliantly in the torchlight. "Does this look like poison ivy to you?"

"Carter, Sousa, report," Jack said over their radios.

"We are perfectly well," Peggy answered, watching Daniel shove back the vines with his crutch to make a path for them. "And we can hear you quite well. Yourself?"

"I'm currently climbing a hill sort of thing." He was panting slightly, with occasional pauses, possibly to do something like what Daniel was doing. "I'm definitely getting radiation readings. No doubt about it now that I'm picking up something. You?"

"We're having a little trouble staying on the trail." In fact, they'd lost it again; the needle was barely moving. She gestured to Daniel to stop. "Did you say the readings you're getting are strong ones?"

"Strong enough to be easy to keep me on track, anyway. Just my luck I'm on the trail of a transformer station or something."

Peggy waved her detector back and forth, getting a feeble twitch of the needle, but no more. "I think ours is growing fainter. Shall we meet you on your hill?"

"If you can find me. Just go straight back to the road and up the other side. I'm trying to keep a straight line."

It turned out he was doing a fairly good job of it. They were able to follow the broken and mashed-down bushes where he'd passed, even with their mutually poor level of woodscraft, and located him without difficulty on top of the hill. He was sitting under a tree, studying the detector, and sprang to his feet with his gun out when they came out of the brush.

Daniel held up his free hand, the torch beam skipping across the wet trees. "Just us."

"You waited for backup," Peggy remarked. "I'm impressed." He was right, though; her detector's needle was already rising in a stronger signal. Their quarry was somewhere over this hill.

The storm had slackened somewhat, perhaps only a temporary respite, but the visibility was clearer than it had been -- or would have been, anyway, if it hadn't been so utterly dark. Peggy could see scattered lights in the darkness below their hill.

"I did a little recon while I waited for you two," Jack said. "There's an old road off to the side there, kind of overgrown, but it goes down into the valley. I got some radiation readings around there. It'll be easier walking than trying to whack our way through the woods, anyhow."

He was right; the walking was better on the road, though it lay deep in fallen and half-rotted leaves from past seasons, a slick layer that forced them to move slowly and plant their feet (or crutch, in Daniel's case) with care. It was still easier for Daniel than the woods had been, Peggy could tell. She'd had no intention of saying anything, let alone asking him if he preferred to wait at the car; Daniel knew his limits and she was confident he wouldn't try to do anything that would endanger himself or others. She felt a slightly awkward gratitude towards Jack for not trying to convince him to stay behind, or even complaining about the fact that Daniel _was_ probably slowing them down on the wet, uneven ground.

Maybe it was just that, with no other backup and no hope of more anytime soon, Jack didn't want to risk alienating one of the few extra gun hands he had available.

"You know," Daniel said, "if we do find Gless, we should probably have some kind of strategy. I'd rather not plug the guy if it's possible we can bring him in and fix him."

"Me neither," Jack admitted. "It'd make things a lot easier if he'll just walk in under his own power. Because, let's not forget here, we don't know how lethal he is at what distance."

Peggy stopped walking.

"Watch it, Marge," Jack protested, his feet skidding on wet leaves as he tried to avoid her.

"I just thought of something." Peggy swung her detector in a slow arc in front of her. Gless had not come down the road, for whatever reason, but the faint traces of his trail weren't far from it. Picking up the signals, she stepped off the road into the wet bushes.

"Peggy?" Daniel said.

"A moment, please." The radiation was strong in this area … stronger than it had been on top of the hill. Their deductions weren't wrong, she thought. Gless had been here, and recently. And if _her_ hunch was right, he'd be even easier to find than they'd thought.

In the rain and the uneven torch beams, it was hard to see anything except vague impressions of wet leaves and dripping branches. By daylight they'd surely have noticed it immediately -- the thing she had guessed she'd find, and she wasn't wrong. Some of the leaves were withered and dead. Crouching, trying to ignore the uncomfortable tug of her wet slacks (the entire outfit was going to be a lost cause), she found that some of the grasses underfoot were withered and blackened as well. When she held the detector's sensor to them, the readings were slightly stronger.

"Peggy!" Jack burst out of the woods on top of her, nearly stepping on her. He had his gun out.

"I said I'd be finished in a moment," she said with great patience, brushing her hands on her wet slacks and straightening up. She had to resist the urge to flee the contaminated area immediately, reminding herself that it couldn't possibly be _that_ lethal or Gless would have left a trail of hundreds of corpses and they'd be doing a lot more than a low-key dragnet of a manhunt tonight.

"No, you mumbled something inexplicable and went charging off into the bushes." Jack holstered his gun with a glower. "We've already fought one guy who can hypnotize people. Now is not the time when I want to find out that Gless's brand-new powers include mind control."

Peggy paid no mind to his ravings. "Jack, look at this," she said, touching the withered leaves with the torch's beam.

"It's a tree. Unless you expect me to identify it, in which case, you're out of --"

"Jack, no, _look._ The leaves are dead." She played the beam downward. "The grass as well."

Jack looked. Then, as she'd done, he ran his radiation detector over the blackened foliage. "Shit," he said quietly.

More crashing in the bushes heralded Daniel's unstealthy arrival in their little conclave. "What is going on back here?"

"Peggy has discovered a new and deeply unsettling aspect of Gless's powers." Jack used his own torch to point out the black leaves. 

Daniel, to his credit, didn't ask for an explanation; he looked at the leaves, turned his head to look thoughtfully along the trail of withered vegetation (to Peggy, it looked as if a fire had burned through the woods, leaving the trees blackened and damaged where it had passed), and then he said, "How wide is it?"

_"Oh,"_ Peggy said. She gave Daniel a quick peck on his cold, wet cheek. Normally they tried to avoid such displays in the field, but she felt in this case it was more than warranted. "We can determine his lethal radius by the range of affected foliage. Daniel, that's excellent."

From examining the foliage, it seemed that Gless's range was, indeed, slightly beyond what he could touch, but not much. It appeared to extend two or three feet beyond him, as if he carried his own personal death field like a bubble around with him.

Peggy examined a couple of trees with dead leaves, and one with a blackened scar on its trunk, that were well out of Gless's presumed radius -- several feet in most cases, and more like ten feet with another -- but it was very difficult to tell if it was natural or not. The trail of dead foliage, however, definitely was not.

"Okay, you wanted a plan?" Jack said. "Here's your plan. We try to talk him in, staying as far back as possible. If he won't come quietly, or if he attacks, we take him down."

"Jack," Peggy said. "He's a victim too."

"He's also lethal, and getting more so, or didn't you notice? He made it all the way through the Lincoln Tunnel in a cab. Didn't kill the driver 'til he got out on the other side -- we think he brushed against the guy. With a range like this, there's no way he could've stayed in the back of the cab without killing the guy."

"His range is expanding," Daniel said, looking pale in the torchlight.

"Yeah. Not fast, but if it's changed this much in the last few hours, who knows if it might not speed up, or expand suddenly so he's not just killing people next to him, but every tree, cow, and farm family in a five-mile radius. You want to explain to _those_ people why we didn't shoot to kill?"

"We talk first," Peggy said firmly.

"Agreed, but if talking doesn't work, we do what we gotta do."

There was no sound but the steady drumming of the rain. Daniel said nothing, refusing to commit himself either way. Finally, Peggy said quietly, "Agreed. But only if we must."

They no longer needed the detectors to follow Gless's trail -- which was good, since Peggy's was starting to fail despite all her efforts to keep it from getting soaked. The needle skipped erratically from one part of the dial to another, and finally she gave up and stuffed it into a pocket of her blazer. It was an awkward burden, making the jacket swing uncomfortably, but it freed her hands for flashlight and gun.

The playful mood from earlier had faded, and all three of them were now possessed by grim purpose. They followed the trail of burnt vegetation, pursuing its erratic twists and turns. Peggy thought it looked like the sort of trail a man might leave if he were stumbling blindly, veering from tree to tree. Was it only that Gless was lost in his own world of grief, unable to cope emotionally with the things his damaged body had forced him to do? Or was it the damage itself that was the problem? The initial medical reports had found nothing wrong with him except slightly elevated levels of radiation, not enough to be dangerous, but enough to make the equipment in his vicinity go slightly haywire. By now, though, it could be affecting his brain.

"At the time he left the SSR," she said, thinking aloud, "Gless wasn't dangerous. The medical staff must have touched him quite a bit, and nothing happened to them."

"Well, yeah, we knew that." Jack's voice was snappish. As well as their shared urgency to find Gless before he hurt anyone else, they were all soaked, cold, and miserable.

"Yes, but did you really think about it? Did any of us? His ability manifested itself in the time between leaving the SSR and coming home to his wife --"

"And it's still developing," Daniel finished for her. "The radiation is still working on his body or … er … doing whatever it does, anyway. It's not a steady-state kind of thing. His powers are still developing."

"Do either of you remember anything else from the files that might be helpful?" Peggy asked, using her torch to push a dead branch out of her way; the withered leaves drooped in the rain, black and slimy-looking. She still had an almost superstitious fear of touching anything Gless had touched. "Anything that might hint at what he's capable of now?"

"Electric shocks," Daniel said slowly. "Didn't some of the medical personnel mention that he shocked them when he touched them? Static electric shocks. Like he was building it up somehow."

"You think perhaps he shocked his victims to death?"

Jack turned back; he'd been walking in front of them. " _This_ sure wasn't any electric shock," he said, waving his torch at the blackened vegetation around them.

"I'm not saying it was an electric shock, exactly," Daniel said. "But it's a working theory, isn't it? The victims died without a mark on them. They could have been electrocuted. That fits."

"Yeah, but _this_ sure doesn't." Jack snapped off a dead leaf and tossed it in Daniel's general direction. The rain caught it and beat it to the ground.

"Do you have to argue with every word out of my mouth?" Daniel demanded. "Is it that important to you to be _right_ all the time?"

Jack looked utterly taken aback. Peggy thought his shock must have been reflected for a moment on her own face; she'd rarely seen Daniel flare up like that. "Stop it," she said, not entirely sure which of them she was talking to. "For the moment, it doesn't really matter. The exact mechanism of his powers is something for the scientists to argue over. We know we'll be safe as long as we stay at least a few feet away from him, and that's what matters."

"No, we won't," Daniel said. He no longer sounded angry, merely very tired. "That's the point. We're all soaking wet and standing in puddles. If it's something like electricity, there might not currently _be_ a safe distance."

There was a brief silence before Jack said, "Well, crap."

"We still try to talk first," Peggy said firmly. "We do _not_ shoot to kill unless we are forced to it."

Still, her eyes crept to Daniel, or more specifically, to his conductive crutch. Jack's gaze had also slid in that direction, she couldn't help noticing.

"Guys." A note of humor entered Daniel's weary voice. "We're _all_ wet, and therefore conductive. My crutch has a rubber tip, so under normal circumstances I'm no more susceptible than the rest of you. Or, at the moment, not any less so."

"Anyone remember the no-getting-electrocuted rule?" Jack demanded. "It still applies, by the way, whether we're talking about lightning or the SSR's very own electric eel."

None of them suggested going back to the cars and returning with more people and better equipment. Peggy knew they were all on the same page about this, without having to say anything. It would take hours to return to the city, hours more to get back, and in the meantime, Gless would move on, his unstable body chemistry continuing to change, leaving an unknown number of bodies behind him. It might take days to corner him again.

_Assuming we've cornered him now …_

But Jack turned without a word and started forward again, pushing aside a branch and cursing softly as it dumped its burden of water down his neck. And Daniel planted his crutch carefully, stepping forward through the tangle of dead foliage that was twice as exhausting and treacherous for him as for the others. He must be worn to the bone from the difficult trek, but he hadn't complained.

She was fiercely proud of them.

 

***

 

The trail of dead vegetation stopped at a chain-link fence. 

Peggy had put away her gun, fearful of water getting into its works, but her hands were ice-cold even though the only thing she was holding at the moment was the torch. She flexed them idly to get the blood flowing in them again, while gazing through the dripping fence at a sea of darkness beyond. A sudden flash of lightning made her jump and illuminated several low, square buildings surrounded by a broad apron of gravel and weeds, and the gaunt steel frame of what was probably a radio tower.

"At least tell me the _fence_ isn't electric," Jack said, and Peggy heard Daniel huff a soft laugh.

"It's not." She hooked her fingers lightly through the wire, felt the rain drip off her fingertips. "Did he go over?"

Jack started messing with his detector, but Daniel simply said, "Around." His torch beam revealed the withered and blackened grasses and meadow flowers against the base of the fence, all but invisible with the way the rain had beaten them down.

"Radiation readings are strong," Jack said. "He's not far away."

The fence circled the building complex, but didn't enclose it completely. At the side that Peggy assumed was the front, a rutted road that looked at least as bad as the one they'd been driving on curved away through the rain. The three SSR agents moved quietly and carefully along the fence to the place where it terminated near the road. By unspoken consent, they were no longer using their torches except occasionally to check their path or Jack's radiation detector.

Crouched behind the fence in rain that had slackened to drizzle -- though Peggy could tell a new arm of the thunderstorm was moving in across the valley, heralded by grumbling thunder and smeary flickers of lightning -- they argued in whispers about their next move.

"We've nothing to gain by sneaking in like assassins," Peggy whispered fiercely.

"Nothing to gain except not getting killed as soon as we set foot inside the fence, you mean?" Jack retorted. "Because if he was going to come quietly, he'd have turned himself in, instead'a running all over the countryside trying to avoid us. We need to do some recon first to see what we're walking into."

"We don't even know he's avoiding the SSR. We assume he lost his head and ran. Maybe that's still what he's doing."

"Right, and paranoid people scared out of their wits are known for making sensible choices when confronted by federal agents with guns."

"All the more reason not to sneak up on him!"

Daniel touched her arm. "You know, Peggy, much as I hate to take Jack's side on this --" This prompted a dirty look from Jack. "-- I think going in quietly is the better way. There might be hostages. Might be bodies. We don't know what's in there."

Peggy looked between them. "All right," she conceded. "We'll do it your way. But absolutely _no_ sniping from shadows. We talk to him first."

"I already agreed to that." Jack sounded mildly petulant.

They crept around the end of the fence, splitting up as they hit the driveway. Daniel faded to the right, around the perimeter of the buildings, moving with stealth despite his handicap. Jack went right, studying his radiation detector with his hand cupped over the flashlight to hide as much of the beam as possible. Peggy went down the drive itself, feeling terribly exposed and relying on the darkness and rain itself to hide her.

The buildings were locked and dark. None of them appeared to have been broken into. Still, as she crept along the base of the wall, Peggy couldn't help imagining Gless on the other side of the wall, out of sight but still sending out his lethal radiation. She wouldn't even know anything had happened; she'd just drop dead…

_Don't borrow trouble,_ she told herself firmly.

And indeed, there seemed no trouble to be borrowed. Peggy's cautious and fruitless inspection took her around to the back of the building complex, where she met Daniel, looking equally puzzled. He shrugged at her. Peggy tried her radiation detector, while Daniel kept lookout, but it was completely useless now; it refused to even turn on.

"Hope Jack's having better luck," Daniel whispered. 

They circled around the group of buildings and found Jack up against the wall of a large building on the radio tower side, attempting to use the roof overhang for shelter as he studied the radiation detector. A broad expanse of somewhat overgrown lawn stretched between their side of the buildings and the fence, with the radio tower in the middle of it.

"It doesn't look like he's here." Peggy tried to speak as softly as possible, but she had to lift her voice above the renewed downpour and the increasing rumble of the thunder.

"Gadget says he's here." Jack was visibly frustrated. "Or near here, anyhow."

"The roof?" Peggy suggested. Though why anyone would be up there in a storm of this ferocity, when he could break into one of the buildings and remain warm and dry …

Lightning flashed as if to underscore her thoughts, and next to her, she felt Daniel jump. His cold hand groped for hers. "Peggy," he whispered. "Jack." When he had their attention, he raised a hand, pointing. "Look up there. Wait for it."

They waited, and in the next white-hot flicker of lightning, Peggy saw the outline of the radio tower against the sky. In that brief instant, it seemed warped, distorted. The lightning died away, leaving lurid afterimages blotting out the darkness, and she had to reconstruct what she'd seen from memory, piecing it together. The dark outline of the tower, its steel frame like a line drawing against the sky. And, at the top, a shape that was lumpier and more organic, a piece that didn't fit …

Jack seemed to realize at the same moment she did. "He's on the radio tower. What kind of idiot climbs a metal tower in a lightning storm?"

"The kind with electrical powers?" Daniel suggested.

Peggy didn't wait for a decision to be made. Drawing her gun but holding it low against her side, she stepped out into the open. Wet grasses swished around her legs.

"Doctor Gless!" she called.

She strained her eyes against the dark sky, but could see nothing. The rain sluiced down her face as she tipped her head back, trying not to think about Daniel's warnings of electrical conductivity.

"Dr. Gless, I'm Agent Peggy Carter with the SSR. You've met me, although you may not remember me. We worked together on a few cases last year, before my transfer to L.A. I'm here with my colleagues to help you."

There was no answer except the hissing of the rain and a grumble of thunder somewhere far away. Had he moved? Peggy resisted the urge to shine her torch on him so she could see him better. Treating him like a zoo animal was no way to win over a frightened and desperate man.

"Dr. Gless, I know your situation seems dire to you now. I'm assured, however, that it is possible to reverse your condition." Actually she knew nothing of the sort, but she was hardly going to say so to a paranoid fugitive. "We are here to help, not to arrest you. Please, let us help."

A sudden bolt of lightning seared her retinas, a forking blue-white streak across the sky directly overhead. For an instant, from one eyeblink to the next, what she saw was an impossibility --

\-- but she had only a split second to see it; her mind had not yet caught up when light and noise filled the world, a tremendous shock like an explosion. She was flung to the ground, rolling in the mud and the grass, only belatedly registering details one by one in her shocked mind: that her ears were ringing, her teeth hurt; that she wasn't alone, but now another body was tangled with hers; that the noise had been a thunderclap, even now dying away --

Then the world fell back on her in a rush of sensation and sound and awareness. The person tangled up with her (half on top, half underneath) was Daniel, and she realized belatedly that he'd tackled her; realized, furthermore, that she really _had_ seen lightning strike the radio tower -- or, no, not merely the tower itself, but the upraised hand of the man (or something manlike, at any rate) clinging to the top of it, raised as if to catch it --

"Come on, come on!" Jack came out of nowhere, out of the rain and the dark, catching hold of both of them -- one hand fisted in Peggy's blazer, the other seizing at Daniel's shirt -- and they all three tumbled backwards, catching and pulling each other, scrambling into the dubious shelter of the ink-black, lightless space against the building's side. Daniel had dropped his crutch, or possibly thrown it away from him in the process of lunging after Peggy, and Jack managed to snag it with his foot and drag it after them, stooping to pick it up once they'd stumbled to a halt against the side of the building.

"What the blue fuck," Jack panted. "I did see that, right? He threw lightning at you!" 

"He did," Daniel confirmed, with a catch in his voice. He had Peggy's arm in a death grip. 

"Is that what happened?" she asked faintly. The ringing in her ears was starting to fade, and the air had a sharp ozone smell.

"Let the record show," Jack said, with a semi-apologetic nod in Daniel's direction as he handed back the crutch, "that Sousa was right."

"Let the record show that Sousa didn't _want_ to be right! Peggy, Peggy, please tell me you're okay."

"I am. Thanks to you." The bruises and the mud now coating her were a small price to pay to avoid being fried. 

"I never thought I'd be nostalgic for an enemy who kills people with black space goo," Daniel muttered, loosening his death grip on Peggy somewhat.

"He tried to kill you, Peggy," Jack said, his voice low and grim. He racked a round in his gun. "I don't think he's coming quietly."

Peggy peered up at the radio tower. Another flash of lightning illuminated the scene, and she glimpsed Dr. Gless staring down at them. In that glimpse she saw a wreck of a man, his clothing partly burned away, his face seared, and little that was human in his eyes. If he'd been unharmed after the accident, he certainly wasn't now.

"I think death might almost be a mercy for him now," she admitted reluctantly.

"Not to be a spoilsport, but it isn't gonna be easy," Daniel pointed out."If we had a rifle we could snipe him, but these guns aren't distance weapons, and the minute we step out in the open to shoot, he'll be able to target us too."

"Roof?" Jack suggested. He pointed up. "Get on top and you'll be able to get pretty close. Close enough to shoot him even under these conditions, I think."

"Yeah, while also making yourself a target for a guy who, and I can't stress this enough, _shoots lightning from his hands,"_ Daniel said.

"Not if someone distracts him," Peggy suggested.

It wasn't meant to be a plan -- even her plans weren't usually this haphazard and dangerous. It was more the _start_ of a brainstorming session. But Jack gave a tight nod and faded back into the shadows.

"Jack, wait!" But now there was only the rain.

"Guess we're the distraction," Daniel murmured. He was pressed against her side, holding her elbow; she felt, more than heard, his soft laugh.

"I greatly dislike the fact that we're executing this man," Peggy said, mostly to herself. She squinted up at the radio tower through the rain.

"We're not," Daniel said. "You gave him a fair chance to surrender, and he tried to kill you. Took a shot at a federal agent. He's dangerous, Peg. We gotta take him down, one way or another."

"I know." But she didn't have to like it. Given more time, she was sure the lab could come up with a way to incapacitate him without hurting him, and perhaps to reverse what had been done to him.

But they didn't have time. _He_ didn't have time. _Can he control it at all now, or is he simply throwing electricity and deadly radiation at random? And what is his lethal radius now, I wonder? Larger than it was, I'm sure …_

"I'm going to try to talk to him again," she decided.

"Peg --"

"If I can talk him down before Jack gets into position, there will be no need to shoot him."

Daniel caught her hand, cold fingers lacing through hers. "He tried to kill you, Peggy."

"I know, but this time I know what he can do, and I can dodge. It's not as if there's no warning."

"Well, if you're set on doing this, I hope you don't think you're doing it alone," Daniel said, in a voice that brooked no argument.

She would have greatly preferred Daniel to stay safely out of range, but he'd probably have preferred the same for her, and _that_ wasn't happening. "Let's split up, then. At least we won't present a unified target."

There was no one to see them in the darkness beneath the roof's shallow overhang, so he kissed her quickly, with lips that tasted of rainwater. "Be careful."

"And you."

She'd felt exposed before, stepping out into the open expanse of weed-grown lawn, but now that she knew what Gless could do, she had to take her courage in both hands to make herself do it. Her nerves still jangled from the other time.

Cold rain sluiced over her. If she hadn't been soaked before, she certainly was now. She could hardly remember what it was like to be dry. The full fury of the storm was above them, thunder shuddering the air and lightning forking across the sky.

Somewhere on the rooftops, Jack would be crouching under this same wild sky, jockeying for position as he took aim at Gless.

"Dr. Gless, I know you didn't mean to hurt me," she called into the night and the storm. By a flicker of more distant lightning, she glimpsed Daniel across from her, near the fence. He had his gun raised, the crutch glinting in his other hand, and she couldn't help thinking of Jack's earlier comment -- half joking and half not -- about aluminum crutches and lightning storms. Daniel was also less maneuverable than either her or Jack.

_Don't think about it. Trust him to do his part, as he trusts you to do yours._

"I know you're afraid, of yourself perhaps most of all," she called up to the barely-seen listener above. Could he even understand her? The glimpses she got of him in the lightning flashes were not promising. He crouched at the top of the radio tower like a monkey in a tree, glaring down at her from a face that was seared and burned. Most of his hair was charred off.

_Think if it was Daniel or Jack up there -- Rose -- even Samberly. Because it easily could be. You'd do anything to bring them in rather than taking the shot, wouldn't you?_

Of course, if she didn't talk him down soon, Jack would take the choice out of her hands, and out of Dr. Gless's, forever.

"We are here to help you, to bring you back to the SSR and attempt to return you to your former good health. We understand that you didn't mean to hurt anyone. You won't be held responsible for anything you did involuntarily under the effects of your lab accident. However, we cannot tolerate attacks on --"

She had a little warning, just a glimmering at the top of the tower, and threw herself to the side as the air gave a tremendous electric snap. The arc was instantaneous, a purple so vivid it seared afterimages onto her retinas, but she sprawled in the mud unharmed; either he hadn't meant to hit her, or she'd gotten out of the line of fire in time.

"Peggy!" Daniel shouted, lost somewhere in eyeball-searing darkness filled with blooming spots of blue and orange.

"I'm all right," she gasped, picking herself up on shaking arms. She blinked rapidly, squeezed her eyes shut and opened them again, trying to erase the afterimages ruining her night vision.

At least now she knew that she could dodge it, as long as she was alert and fast. Still, it was reaction and fear, more than cold, that made her shiver as she stood up to face the tower emerging slowing from the spots blotting out her sight. Give her a gun in her hands and a threat she could shoot at. Dealing with this kind of thing would never be easy for her; she couldn't help remembering the chilling and unnatural cold and pain when Whitney Frost had laid hands on her, the blankness in Dooley's eyes as she'd looked down the barrel of his gun. She _hated_ dealing with threats she couldn't understand.

And she also knew it was time to end this, before more people got hurt or killed. She had a responsibility to bring him in alive if she could -- but she also had a responsibility to protect others. And Gless, whoever he had once been, was a danger right now.

"Dr. Frank Gless," she called, putting all the authority of command into her voice that she could muster. "We do not want to hurt you, but if you don't surrender yourself to the SSR immediately, we will use force against you. We are giving you fair warning." Her hand tightened on her gun. "These attacks cannot be tolerated. Surrender or we will use all necessary force to stop you."

What happened next, happened fast -- at the literal speed of lightning. An eye-searing flash -- and Peggy just had time to see that _she_ wasn't the target this time: Gless, clinging to the top of the tower, drew down the lightning on himself (there was no longer any doubt, impossible as it seemed, that he really _was_ doing that -- and redirected it at Daniel. 

A sudden fusillade of gunfire erupted from the rooftop. Jack didn't have time to aim properly, with Daniel's life on the line, but he did manage to throw off Gless's aim. Tremendous showers of sparks leaped and burst like fireworks along the wire fence. Peggy thought she heard Daniel yell, but it was lost in a deafening crash of thunder, as the light went out with the same sharp suddenness as it had appeared and left her utterly night-blind. 

Peggy's hair felt as if it was standing on end; the air itself seemed to be electrically charged. The darkness pressed like a great fist against her eyes. She bit back on an urge to scream Daniel's name; it was irrational and all she'd do was draw Gless's attention to herself. Instead she raised her gun, getting ready for the next time lightning lit up the sky.

The next flash of lightning showed her the scene like a black-and-white snapshot: Jack standing up on the roof, taking grim aim with his gun hand resting in the steadying palm of his other hand; Daniel fallen on the grass; Gless dangling from the tower's metal frame, leaning out, hand outstretched, catching and redirecting it --

And Peggy _saw_ it hit Jack as he squeezed the trigger, or at least she thought she did -- the gunshot was lost in a deafening thunderclap, and the blinding flare of light allowed her only a glimpse of Jack tumbling off the roof like a rag doll.

She hadn't been fast enough, and now it was dark again, but Peggy aimed for the place where she'd last seen Gless. She couldn't see anything; her vision was nothing but utter blackness decorated with bruise-colored blossoms in the shape and pattern of the lightning -- Jack's silhouette still burned like a macabre statue into her retinas. Into that flaring darkness, she fired at the picture of Gless in her head, pulling the trigger as fast as the gun could eject its bullet casings.

Light played across the top of the tower, little blue glimmers, running up and down the metal framework. Peggy thought at first that it was a reflection of distant lightning, but the sky was flat and dark, while the white-blue and purple flickers at the top of the tower gave her glimpses of Gless clinging to the metal framework. He was no longer leaning out as he had been; instead he'd hooked his arms and legs around the upper structure of the metal frame, resting his head against it. She was almost sure she'd hit him at least once, and she thought with mingled regret and triumph that he might be dead, but then he stirred, raising his head.

Peggy cursed under her breath, fumbling to reload her gun in the rain. At least the guns were still working. She'd been assured by her SOE instructors that modern guns could even fire underwater, but she'd seen enough weapons malfunctions during the war to fear a misfire in these appalling conditions. Still, how much ammunition had they wasted on him already? Daniel was right, these small guns were the wrong tool for trying to shoot someone at this distance.

"Daniel?" she called. "Jack?"

"Peggy!" Daniel stumbled out of the rain, half-fell against her. Peggy clutched at his arm and opened her mouth to speak, but he didn't give her a chance, speaking so fast his words tumbled over each other. "Try to stay out of his live-fire zone. I have an idea."

"Wait, what --" But Daniel pulled away from her and was gone into the rain. He was moving more awkwardly than usual, half-falling at each step, and she realized, an instant too late to do anything about it, that he must be hurt. But he was moving with stubborn purpose and clearly had a plan.

With another anxious glance up at Gless on the tower, she did as Daniel had suggested and got herself out of sight, ducking under the overhanging roof of the building.

She hadn't heard anything from Jack yet, which was deeply worrying given the circumstances under which she'd last seen him. Peggy called his name softly and got no answer. She didn't dare use her torch; instead, with the gun lowered at her side, she circled the building, straining her eyes against the dark. Without really thinking about it, she'd settled into a battle-zone calm: it was possible that she was about to stumble over Jack's charred corpse in the darkness, but there wasn't anything she could do about that. If he was alive but injured, though, she needed to find him.

From somewhere nearby there was a loud clang, metal banging on metal. What on earth was Daniel up to?

"Jack," she called quietly.

It was movement that caught her eye, a dark shape thrashing feebly in the rain. She hurried to him, splashing muddy water up her legs. As she knelt beside him, she shoved her gun into her pocket and took out her torch; for this, she needed to be able to see. She cupped her hand around the business end of the torch to dim the light and hopefully avoid drawing Gless's attention.

Jack's movements were uncoordinated and clumsy, though Peggy couldn't tell by looking at him if the problem was electric shock, or the fall off the roof, or both. He blinked, squinting against her light. He'd lost his hat in the fall, and his hair was matted to his forehead, turned dark in the rain.

"Jack, can you hear me?" She put her hand on the side of his face, turning it firmly so she could get a look at him. His pupils contracted to pinpricks as her light swept across his eyes.

"Peggy?" he said faintly.

She let out a breath. He was dazed, but he was conscious, and he knew her. "Yes. It's me. Can you sit up?"

"I don't know," he said in that same small, stunned voice. 

Peggy slid her arm under the shoulders of his sodden coat. She had to use her own strength to lift him; he tried to help, but was still jerky and uncoordinated. Once she got him up, he leaned against her shoulder, head bowed while rainwater ran into his eyes.

Her radio crackled, making her jump. She'd forgotten she had it on her. "Peggy, do you read me?" Daniel asked. "Where are you?"

"I'm behind the building nearest to the tower." She looked down at the top of Jack's head. He had brought up his hand to grip her arm for further support. "Jack's with me."

"Thank God," Daniel said fervently. "Okay, both of you stay there and get up against the side of the building, as close as you can."

"Why?" Peggy asked. There was no answer. She sighed. "Jack, can you get up?"

"I'm not _that_ bad off." His voice was a little stronger now, but still hoarse and slurred. He made an abortive effort to get to his feet, and his legs collapsed under him like wet paper. 

Gritting her teeth, Peggy hauled him up with her, half-standing and half-crouching, nearly dragging him. Fortunately it took only a few short steps to get them up against the cinderblock wall of the building.

At the same time Peggy realized that there was a new sound, a low throbbing rumble that vibrated through the soles of her feet.

"Did we get him?" Jack asked hoarsely.

"Er, not yet." She tried to decide where she'd heard a sound like that before. It was familiar, but under present conditions she couldn't place it.

"I don't remember anything," Jack mumbled. She could feel him shivering against her. "I was on the roof, and then in the mud. Did lightning actually hit me?"

"I don't know. I didn't see for certain." The deep growl shivering through her feet was getting louder. "Jack, can you stay here for a minute? I want to see what Daniel's doing."

"Okay," he agreed complacently, and _that_ didn't seem like a good sign, but for the moment she couldn't worry about it. Instead she propped him against the side of the building and went quickly and stealthily to the corner.

She peeked out just in time to be dazzled, not by lightning this time, but by the yellow glare of an array of lights: two below, two above. The throbbing, pulsing rumble, no longer muted by the buildings, was now a roar, and in that instant the picture in front of her came together and she understood what she was looking at.

Somehow Daniel had found a bulldozer.

He had the blade down, and the throttle opened up. The machine plowed across the wet ground, peeling up a broad swath of sod, and slammed into the base of the tower. Tortured metal screamed, and the heavy steel bars supporting the tower began to buckle.

Gless apparently realized what was happening as his sanctuary shuddered and tilted under him. Lightning arced from him with an audible crack. Peggy shouted Daniel's name, but it was lost in the man-made thunderclap and the roar of the bulldozer's powerful engine.

But the lightning never made it to its target; instead it grounded on the iron body of the machine, framing Daniel in a protective cage. Through the dazzling display of sparks, Peggy saw Daniel flinch violently and duck, but he seemed to be okay; his hands remained steady on the controls, and the bulldozer bore forward, its powerful engine throbbing.

Peggy's eyes watered from the explosions of sparks as Gless continued to rain lightning on the bulldozer. Nowhere was safe; stray bolts jumped to the fence, to puddles, to the wet side of the building. She was sure she was about to get shocked herself at any moment.

But now she could see the bastard. She leveled her gun, holding it steady in her wet hands, and squeezed off a shot. 

There was only a dry click, felt through her hands rather than heard in the cacophony around her.

Misfire.

Hands shaking, mouth dry, Peggy ejected the failed bullet and tried again. This time the gun jolted with recoil, though she barely heard her own gunshot through the noise. She couldn't see if Gless had flinched. She snapped off another shot, another --

And the tower finally went over, its nearest supports ripping out of the ground, bringing up huge chunks of the poured concrete it had been anchored in. The entire structure bent like hot plastic as the bulldozer jolted forward, no longer encountering resistance. As the tower bent over the roof of the bulldozer, twisting and warping, Gless lost his grip and fell.

Peggy had a horrible instant when she couldn't see how close he'd landed to Daniel. What was his radius now -- five feet, ten? Possessed by terrible fear, she ran into the open. The lightning storm had died, but through the spots dancing in her vision she could still see better than before, with the backwash of the bulldozer's brilliant headlights illuminating the entire area between the fence and road. She saw Gless on the grass, struggling to rise, and brought her gun to bear on him.

At this distance, without having to compensate for the elevation of the tower, Peggy was a good enough shot that she almost couldn't miss. She fired three times, and saw his body jerk in a series of spasms as every bullet went home. He pitched forward on the grass.

And hers weren't the only gunshots ringing through the night. Looking over her shoulder, she saw Jack leaning heavily against the side of the building, gun clutched in both hands. He gave her a tight nod and let the gun fall as if he'd lost the strength to hold it up, sagging after it and sliding to the base of the wall.

With wet, shaking hands Peggy pulled out her torch, keeping the gun in one hand, the torch in the other, and walked slowly through the torn-up grass towards Gless's body. The beam revealed the scientist sprawled and immobile, his face a blackened ruin, his one remaining eye open and staring. The grass around him had withered and died to a distance of five or six feet in every direction.

Peggy stared at him for a long moment, because she dared not risk the consequences of _not_ doing it -- she had to make sure he wasn't moving, and even more critically, that the circle of black, withered grass wasn't still spreading. Nothing moved except grasses bending under the force of the storm. The bulldozer was stationary now, idling in place with the tower wrapped over the top of it, and its muted rumble shivered her feet.

"Peggy?" Daniel shouted over the engine's noise.

"He's dead," she called back. Some part of her expected that staring eye to blink, that twisted body to lurch into motion, but it didn't appear that Gless's newfound powers extended to coming back from the dead.

_You poor bastard,_ she thought, and turned away.

The bulldozer's engine died, and the lights along with it. Suddenly everything seemed very dark and very quiet. The only sound was the hiss of the rain and the low, intermittent creaking of the warped and half-fallen radio tower, swinging slowly in the wind. Peggy looked up at it warily, but it didn't look like it was in any immediate danger of going ahead and falling on them.

She slogged through the wet grass to the side of the bulldozer and looked up at Daniel. He was still sitting in the driver's seat, looking pale and shell-shocked in her torch beam. One hand rested on the steering controls, the other in his lap.

"You okay?" he asked her.

"I am." She held out a hand. "Want to get down?"

He clasped her hand with the one that had been resting on the controls. Peggy stretched up to clasp his opposite shoulder, helping him down. Daniel slumped wearily against the side of the bulldozer.

"How did you find this?" she asked, looking up at the scarred metal side of the beast.

"My dad used to work in a salvage yard. I thought these big square buildings looked like they might be heavy equipment sheds. Didn't dare hope I'd get this lucky, though."

Peggy retrieved his crutch from the cab of the bulldozer. When she held it out to him, he reached for it automatically with his left hand, and then hissed in pain and jerked away, taking it with the other instead.

"Daniel, what's wrong?"

"Hand." His grin was rueful. "Burned."

She took his hand in hers, turning it gently to expose shocking blisters and welts, mainly along the sides but also in the palm. Weals showed in livid strips against the sides of his loosely curled fingers.

"Oh, Daniel," she said helplessly. It looked agonizing, and she wondered if Daniel was worrying, as she now was, that he'd never have full use of that hand again.

"Not much I can do about it 'til we get back to civilization, though, is it?" He retrieved his hand from Peggy's gentle grasp, holding it against his stomach while leaning heavily on the crutch gripped in his right hand. "Crutch saved me, I think. Gless did get me, but it grounded through the crutch. Can't wait to tell Thompson _that."_ He looked up, and worry flashed across his face. "Where is he?"

"Back here."

Jack was where he'd fallen, propped on the side of the building with his head tilted to the side, looking a little like a drunk who'd passed out in a crumpled and awkward-looking heap. When Peggy shook his shoulder lightly, he jerked and opened his eyes, pulling away from her and raising a hand in uncoordinated self-defense.

"It's only me and Daniel." She went down to her knees beside him; she was wet enough now that it hardly made a difference that she was kneeling in a puddle.

Jack lowered his hand, the fingers curled in a loose fist. "We get him _now?"_ he asked faintly.

"We did indeed. How would you like to take a little walk to somewhere dry?"

"Dry sounds real good."

She got him up with one arm under his shoulders. He was very wobbly, leaning on her heavily, but managed to stick to something resembling a straight line. Daniel didn't seem terribly steady either. They skirted widely around Gless's body; Peggy took another look to be sure the radius of death wasn't continuing to spread, but it seemed to be the same.

The double doors at the front of the largest building stood wide open to the rain. This would do, Peggy thought, and steered Jack inside. It had a gravel floor and little else, at the moment, besides some fuel barrels and a rumpled pile of canvas that had probably covered the machine. Peggy helped Jack sit down on this. He buried his head in his heads. 

"How do you feel?" she asked.

"Strange," he said after a moment, raising his head with one hand pressed to his forehead. "Kinda hung over, you know, that shaky, fuzzy feeling." There was a wan ghost of a smile. "Or are you going to tell me Peggy Carter never had a hangover?"

"I could say it, but it wouldn't be true," she said with an answering smile. He seemed to be coming back to himself a little, the worrisome haziness receding somewhat.

Daniel settled beside them with a grunt of effort. Jack jerked; he seemed to have forgotten Daniel was there. _Still a little out of it,_ she thought, straightening up.

"Hey," Daniel said, looking up. "Where are you going?"

Peggy swept a worried glance over the human wreckage that was the remains of her team. Jack still looked like he was going to fall over, and Daniel was starting to shiver as shock from his burned hand set in. "I'm going to see if I can find a phone. See if you two can get warmed up a little while I'm gone."

 

***

 

Peggy had to break into two of the other buildings before she found the office. When she picked up the receiver and heard the comforting hum of a dial tone, relief swept over her, making her knees weak. She was surprised to find her finger trembling slightly as she dialed the SSR's number. Agent Vicks answered the phone, his light Texan drawl instantly recognizable.

"Vicks? It's Carter."

"Carter! My God -- pardon my French, ma'am -- but I'm glad to have a check-in from you. Half the agents are out of touch, including both bureau chiefs, we've still got no idea where Gless is, and it's a regular gullywasher out there."

"Both chiefs are with me," she said. "And Gless is no longer a threat. It's a very long story, but we're going to need a containment team and some medical assistance."

A complicated back-and-forth ensued, as she tried to describe their location and sketch enough details of their situation to get a proper response team assembled. The biggest problem was that Peggy still had no idea where they were.

"I'll get Carlsburg, ma'am. He's with one of the teams up the Hudson valley right now, but he grew up in the central New York area and claims he knows it like the back of his hand. Is there a number where we can call you back?"

There was no sign of a number on or around the phone. "No," she admitted. "I'll check back in with you soon, Agent Vicks. But I need to check on my colleagues first."

"Understood, ma'am. We'll have a team ready to go by the time you call back."

Privately, as she hurried through the slackening rain to the larger equipment shed, Peggy thought they'd be lucky if help got here before morning, if not later. Still, it was possible they were right off some major highway that they'd missed in the rain and dark.

The doors of the equipment shed had been pulled mostly shut during her absence, but light streamed out of the crack between them -- Jack or Daniel had apparently found a light switch. Opening the door enough to slip inside, Peggy found them both huddled in the canvas. Jack had rolled onto his side and looked like he was either asleep or passed out. She sat down between them, frowned down at Jack in some concern and then looked over at Daniel, who at least was sitting up and conscious, the canvas pulled around his shoulders and his injured hand tucked into his shirt.

"Yeah, I don't know either," Daniel said. "He's breathing okay and growled at me when I tried to poke at him, so now I'm just leaving him alone. I think he got fried pretty hard."

"So did you," she pointed out. "Are you sure you don't want me to try to do something for your hand?"

Daniel shook his head. "Better to leave it alone. You get through?"

"I did." She filled him in briefly on the state of the rescue, such as it was. "I wish I could be more helpful in guiding them, but I really haven't any idea where we are. You were looking at the map; do you know?"

"I wish," he sighed, with a shake of his head. "Somewhere east of the Hudson is about the best I can do. And all the maps are back with our cars."

"Well, we'll simply have to --" She broke off at noises outside, audible through the rain: the sound of an engine and the crunch of gravel under tires.

Daniel shared a startled look with her. "That can't be the SSR. They couldn't possibly get here that fast."

"Not unless someone just happened to be on the same road we were on." Peggy rose and drew her gun.

Outside, a car door slammed, and a stranger's voice called, "Hello? Somebody here?"

"Gless's body," Daniel gasped, and he started struggling painfully to his feet, as fast as he could. Peggy was much faster, running to the door as adrenaline jolted through her body, washing away her weariness and aches. There was no reason why anyone would come here to threaten them -- they'd only been chasing Gless, not an entire group of enemies -- which meant it was almost certainly a civilian, and if they saw the body and decided to investigate --

Peggy burst through the door. An older-model pickup truck with a bed caged in wooden slats was idling on the gravel drive, its headlights illuminating the tangled mess of the radio tower. The man who'd just stepped down from the driver's side of the truck was staring at that, scratching his head.

Peggy tucked the hand holding the gun into her pocket, where it could be drawn out quickly if necessary. "This is a crime scene," she said loudly, in her most commanding voice. "It's rather unsafe at the moment. Please stay near your vehicle."

The man turned and got a good look at her, and she could see from his grizzled face that the main things he was seeing were "female," "alone," and "bedraggled." "You okay, ma'am? Somebody hurt you? How'd you get out here all by yourself?"

"I'm a federal agent," Peggy said crisply. She could see this wash right over him and fail to register. "This is a crime scene. My colleagues and I could use your help if you live nearby."

"If you want to get in the truck, ma'am, I can drive you to a police station --" 

"Where are we?" Peggy interrupted.

"Ma'am, you seem a little confused. If you'll just get in the truck --"

"At least tell me the name of the nearest town!" Peggy snapped.

That, at least, got through. "Well, Roseville's 'bout five or six miles that way. We ain't big enough to have the police, though, ma'am, you'd have to go over to --"

Daniel arrived at her side just then, and he had his ID card out, gripped between two fingers of the hand holding the crutch. The other was still pressed to his stomach. "Chief Sousa, SSR. Like my colleague asked ..." He tipped his head respectfully in Peggy's direction as he flipped up the badge. "We could really use your help if you live nearby."

Daniel, at least, was able to get useful answers out of him, and Peggy tried not to be _too_ annoyed that those answers were directed entirely at Daniel rather than at her. It turned out that he was a farmer who lived just up the road. The commotion had awakened his animals, and he'd driven over to see what was going on.

"Do you have a phone?" Daniel asked.

"Sure, just got it a few years ago. Musta been some storm up here, huh?"

"Musta been," Daniel muttered. "Can we get a ride to your farm?"

Jack lurched out, wakened by the conversation, and a low-key argument ensued. There was only room for two people in the cab of the truck (possibly three if they didn't mind being extremely cozy) and the farmer was shocked by the suggestion of Peggy riding in the back of the truck. Jack and Daniel seemed to share this opinion. Peggy was equally adamant that two injured men shouldn't be stuck in the truck bed in the wind and rain.

They all glared at each other. 

"Work it out amongst yourselves," Peggy declared, and went off to the bulldozer, leaving them looking after her in annoyed bafflement.

She'd had an idea about keeping civilians away from the possibly contaminated body. She thought she was going to have to hotwire the machine, but found that there were keys in it, which explained how Daniel had been able to start it so easily. Peggy examined the controls and then carefully backed it out from under the radio tower (there was a tremendous screeching of tortured metal, but it didn't go ahead and fall over, which had been a concern) and drove the bulldozer in a big circle. She parked it between Gless's body and the driveway, making sure to stay well outside the death zone.

She didn't envy the SSR science team that was going to get to clean this up.

Peggy got back to the truck to find that Jack and Daniel had settled themselves in the back, along with the canvas, which they were using as a makeshift windbreak/rain shelter. "Fine," she murmured, and climbed in the front.

It was, indeed, only a short drive of a few minutes to the farmhouse. Their arrival roused the whole family -- a cheerful, friendly farm wife and half a dozen kids. The farmer's wife immediately took charge of the three bedraggled agents, sweeping them off to provide dry clothes, hot coffee, and soup.

Peggy was fascinated by the change in Jack. Obviously determined to behave normally in front of their hosts, he'd pulled himself together and was doing a credible job of being his usual charming, personable self. Daniel, meanwhile, was increasingly pale and wilting. The farmer's wife, having worked out that his hand was injured, hussled him off to the bathroom to do some first aid. Peggy ignored his "help me" look and went off to the telephone instead, to call the SSR and give them better directions.

After a long conversation involving a number of relayed messages via radio, Peggy got the response team headed in the right direction and a promise that they'd be out in a couple of hours, roads permitting. She hung up and finally accepted the dry clothing she'd been offered, stepping into the couple's bedroom to change into a high-necked gingham dress belonging to the farmer's wife. It was too large in the hips and too tight in the bosom, but at least it was blessedly dry.

Coming out of the bedroom, she realized that she hadn't seen Jack in awhile.

It was one of the farm dogs, showing an unusual interest in the rear door opening from the kitchen to the backyard, that gave her a clue. She peeked outside and discovered Jack out back by the corner of the house, very quietly and stealthily throwing up beside an overturned tin washtub.

"Oh, Jack," she sighed, but not loud enough for him to hear; she had a feeling he'd rather not be discovered in his current state. She waited until he was finished -- slumped against the wall, looking miserable -- and then banged the door against its frame loud enough for Jack to hear. He jumped and raised his head, which had dropped against the wall, but didn't move as she picked her way through the puddles in the yard to him. 

"You know," Peggy said, putting a hand on his arm, "if you continue to pretend nothing's wrong, you'll only make yourself sicker."

"I'm fine," he mumbled, eyes half closed.

"Yes, you look like it."

"It was a mistake trying to eat something, though," he added, mustering a wan smile.

"Jack ..."

"Did I see Sousa driving a bulldozer earlier? Because if I was hallucinating, it was a doozy."

Peggy smiled despite her worry and allowed the obvious change of subject to stand unchallenged. "Yes, Daniel managed to commandeer a bulldozer. It was nicely done. He pushed over the radio tower and gave us a shot at Gless."

"Good for him. That was a clever idea."

"It's not me you should be telling," she said, rather pointedly.

Jack gave a soft, tired snort of a laugh. "Yeah, like Sousa gives a damn what I think."

"He cares very much what you think," Peggy said softly. "That's more than half the problem, I suspect."

Jack looked blank, then thoughtful. 

Taking advantage of the opportunity, Peggy gave him a gentle shove towards the door. "I don't know about you, but I'm quite enjoying being dry for a change, and would prefer not to stay outside until I'm soaked through again."

She left him sitting on a chair in a quiet corner of the kitchen, and went to find the farmer's wife. "Is there somewhere my colleague could lie down for awhile?" she asked. "He's not feeling well." Jack, she knew, would hate to have it presented in those terms, but she'd made sure he was out of earshot.

The farmhouse had no spare bedrooms, but the couple offered up their own bed; the children had gone back to bed, but the adults were up and likely to stay that way, since they always started their day early, and dawn was only a couple of hours away. Peggy went and fetched Jack quietly from the corner where she'd left him. To her surprise, he didn't object at all, a telling sign of his current mental and physical state. Peggy deposited him on the bed, pried off his wet shoes, and left him there.

Leaving the bedroom, she realized that Daniel was also wilting badly; drawn and pale, he was making monosyllabic answers as the farm wife fussed over his bandages. Peggy corralled him and pulled him away.

"Where are we going?" Daniel asked, putting up mild resistance to being led.

"You are going to keep an eye on Jack for awhile," Peggy declared. "I'd like to make sure he doesn't have a seizure and choke to death in his sleep."

"Sounds like fun," Daniel muttered, and then balked even harder when he discovered that he was being dragged into a bedroom, particularly a bedroom in which Jack was curled on top of the covers, facing the wall and apparently asleep. The look that he turned on her said it all.

"Don't give me that. It's a large bed, and you'll be a good deal more useful if you get a couple of hours' sleep before the SSR gets here. Besides, I really do think it's unwise for either of you to be left alone right now."

"Right, because I'll _definitely_ wake up in time to stop him from choking to death if he chooses to go out that way." But Daniel sank down onto the edge of the bed with obvious weariness. He peeled off his shoes one at a time with the attitude of a man who could barely summon up the energy even for that.

As the bed dipped under Daniel's weight, Jack raised his head, blinking in sleepy confusion. "What the hell," he mumbled.

"Blame Peggy," Daniel declared. He flopped on the neighboring pillow and threw an arm over his eyes.

Peggy decided to leave them to work it out, and went back to the living room. She was exhausted herself, but _someone_ had to stay awake to take care of things.

 

***

 

The SSR arrived in the glinting light of morning. The clouds were scudding away, leaving patches of blue sky with the sun peeking through, as three sleek black SSR cars jolted into the rutted, muddy farmyard. They looked strikingly out of place, though no more so, Peggy thought, than she herself probably would in her usual city clothes, as opposed to the borrowed gingham dress with a frilly apron sewn into it.

She'd prodded Daniel and Jack awake at the first sound of tires outside the farmhouse window, and now they were yawning and cradling cups of coffee, but both looked better than they had before getting a few hours' sleep. Daniel had a newly developed red-eyed, feverish look to him, and Peggy made a mental note to be sure he was on the first car back to New York City, to get his hand looked at. Jack, in contrast, seemed to have perked up, shaking off the lingering wooziness from the lightning strike enough to take charge of the situation, ordering around the other agents as if nothing had happened. Peggy caught Daniel's eye, smiled and shrugged. Jack would be Jack. Daniel didn't look particularly bothered by it; Peggy wondered if they'd actually had a talk about things, or if Daniel was simply feeling too ill to waste energy.

After she and Jack had led the science team to the radio tower and Gless's body, Jack started visibly flagging and finally consented to be packed into a car for the drive back to New York. Peggy remained on the scene while the scientists scurried about, draping a cordon of curtains around the immediate area of the body and laying out equipment. By daylight, the entire area looked much smaller and shabbier than Peggy remembered, the buildings blocky and prosaic, the fence no taller than her head even though she distinctly remembered it rising twice as high. 

Eventually she wandered over to a random agent who looked utterly bored by the proceedings. "Care to assist me in retrieving our cars?"

The trek over the hill -- up the little road and down the other side -- seemed surprisingly short by daylight, and the cars were right where they'd left them. Peggy drove one car, Agent Fodor drove the other, and they wended their way up a narrow valley and down the next one over, until they managed to find the farm and the rest of the SSR crew. Aside from those who'd stayed to maintain a watch on the science team, the rest of them were packing up.

_And it's over,_ Peggy thought.

Over but for Gless, and his victims, and all their grieving families.

She regretted that. But those _she_ cared about were still alive and safe, if not precisely well, and she couldn't possibly regret _that._

She accepted the offer of a lift back to the SSR from one of the agents who was going that way, deciding not to insist on driving herself this time. The sky was mostly blue now, the sun warm. Peggy retrieved the bundle of their damp clothing from the farmer's wife, bid a grateful farewell to the family, and climbed into a car driven by young, freckled Agent Nilsson, one of the new hires to replace the numerous agents they'd lost in the purges after the Council debacle.

"I guess you must be looking forward to getting back to California, ma'am," Nilsson said.

Peggy thought about correcting the "ma'am" to "Agent," but right now she couldn't be bothered. She had her window rolled down, the air smelled warm and springlike, and she simply felt _good._ "I admit I wasn't expecting my time in New York to be quite this eventful," she told him. "Tell me about yourself, Agent. Where are you from?"

She chatted with him all the way to New York, and tried not to think about the fact that he'd probably been no older than twelve or thirteen when she was learning to stab men in the neck in the SOE. The world moved on, thank God. She had him let her out in front of the hospital where she was assured that the injured agents had been taken.

She found them both in an exam room. Daniel's hand had been rebandaged, and he had a relaxed, slightly loopy look that gave her the impression he'd been given fairly heavy-duty painkillers to have his wound cleaned. Jack was sitting on a chair beside the bed that he'd flipped around backwards, arms draped on the chair back. He still looked wan and tired -- more so now that there was no one to order around; having something to do had been giving him an incentive to delve into his energy reserves, but now he looked like he was struggling not to fall asleep. He was still wearing the same borrowed clothes he'd changed into at the farm. 

It hadn't struck Peggy as funny in the milieu of the farm, but here it did: Jack Thompson in a plaid shirt and dungarees, his bare feet stuck into his damp shoes.

"Laugh it up, Carter," he said, catching her expression.

"I did get our clothes back." She patted the bundle tucked under her arm, and sat down beside Daniel. "They're still rather damp, though. And how are you two? Do they plan on keeping you overnight?"

Jack sighed. "No, but we're waiting on some tests to come back from the science department to make sure we're not going to drop dead from exposure to Gless. They might want to look at you, too."

"Is that a possibility?" Peggy asked, slightly alarmed.

"No," Jack said.

"Not likely, anyway," Daniel put in. He slipped his good hand into hers. "Just a precaution."

She laced her fingers through his, and lightly touched the bandages on his other hand. "What did they say about this?"

"They think it should heal up okay." He grimaced. "Gonna make field work difficult for awhile. Tough to hold a gun when I also need that hand for walking."

"You shouldn't be going out in the field when you're injured anyway."

"Look who's talking. 'It's only a giant hole in my abdomen, I'm fine.'"

"Wait, when did that happen?" Jack wanted to know.

"It's entirely irrelevant, particularly as I'm the only person in this room who did, in fact, manage to avoid being struck by lightning last night." She smiled sweetly at Jack. "Which is particularly ironic in light of your admonishment to _us_ to do that very thing."

"I knew someone was going to bring that up," Jack groaned. "Hey, _he_ got hit too." He stabbed a finger at Daniel.

"Grounded through my crutch," Daniel said smugly. "You should think about getting one."

The scientists came back just then to give them a clean bill of health, though they insisted on taking some blood from Peggy and running a Geiger counter over her before they let her go.

"And now, uptown to the Stark manor," Peggy declared, tucking her arm through Daniel's left one, with great care to avoid his hand. "Where we have clean, dry clothes waiting for us, and even more importantly, _sleep."_ She and Daniel usually stayed at the Stark residence when they were in town; Peggy still had a lot of her things there, though she was more or less permanently residing in L.A. now.

"You two are headed back to California in the next day or two, aren't you?" Jack asked in a semi-casual kind of way as they headed downstairs.

"That's the plan, yeah," Daniel said. "Unless you have any other crises that need our expertise to handle."

"I've got some filing that needs to be done," Jack said, smirking at both of them.

"Pass," they said in unison, then glanced at each other.

"Well, if _that's_ how it's going to be ... but," he said, shifting from flippant to serious in an instant, "we oughta get a drink or something before you go."

"Come out to the Stark house tonight," Peggy suggested. "Howard has a cook on call -- we don't usually bother when it's just us, but gourmet meals are certainly within our power to provide, as well as the distinct possibility of dinner entertainment, courtesy of Angie. She's been practicing a tap routine." She also had every intention of seeing if she could talk him into spending the night; it wasn't as if they had any lack of guest bedrooms, and she really didn't think someone who'd been struck by lightning should be left unsupervised for the first day or two. Knowing Jack, he'd probably downplayed the seriousness of what had happened to him when he was talking to the medical staff. He still seemed shaky, though he was trying not to show it.

"You sure I wouldn't be imposing on your love nest?" Jack asked in a voice laden with innuendo.

"We're sharing a house with Angie," Daniel pointed out.

"Hmm. Fair point."

They emerged from the hospital's doors only to be hit in the face by a gust of wind with a spattering of rain in it. More clouds had rolled in, chasing the blue sky inland. Peggy sighed inwardly and buttoned up the top button of her borrowed gingham dress. When she'd first moved to L.A., she'd found the hot dry weather oppressive; now she found that she couldn't wait to get back to it.

"Six o'clock okay?" Jack asked suddenly, squinting against another gust of wind.

"Or earlier," Daniel suggested. " _We_ are taking the rest of the day off. I suggest you do the same."

"Chief's work is never done, you know that. Especially when there's a ton of cleanup for a newsworthy case going on." Jack spun around and pointed a finger at them. "Paperwork, you two. On my desk tomorrow."

"We'll get right on that," Peggy promised without any particular sincerity, leaning into Daniel.

They watched him walk away, listing slightly, and Peggy murmured, "How long do you think he'll last at the office?"

"I wouldn't give him more than half the day, at the most. Think he'll actually come over?"

"Oh, I'm quite sure he will. I'll put my wager on three p.m., and furthermore that he'll be asleep on the couch by four." She squeezed his arm. "How are you, really?"

"I'm all right. Tired. Painkillers starting to wear off. Looking forward to getting somewhere I can sit down."

It wasn't always easy, Peggy thought as she sat in the backseat of a cab going uptown, her head resting on Daniel's shoulder, to live a life that straddled two coasts. She had one foot in L.A. and one foot still in New York, and she didn't see that changing in the near future. And _nothing_ about her life was anything like what she'd envisioned, even as a child when her dreams had been wider and deeper. She'd daydreamed about travel and adventure, but never guessed that she'd end up dedicating her life to taking down Russian spies and men and women with otherworldly powers.

And yet, here she was. And more than just that, she thought; she also had people she loved scattered around the world, people she was proud to fight side-by-side with. She hadn't guessed that this would be her life, but for all its ups and downs, she wouldn't trade it for anything.

"You're strangely quiet," Daniel murmured.

"Are you saying I talk too much, Chief Sousa?"

"Not at all." He turned his head to kiss her forehead. "Just wondering what you're thinking about."

"I'm only thinking about how lucky I am, that's all."

"Ah," he said softly. His arm tightened around her, and no more words were spoken for the rest of their ride uptown.


End file.
